FDA's priority-based assessment of food additives. I. Preliminary results.

The principles outlined in the Bureau of Foods' recently published Toxicological Principles for the Safety Assessment of Direct Food Additives and Color Additives Used in Food (the Redbook) have been systematically applied to a Bureau of Foods food additive data base comprising nearly 1600 food and color additives and synthetic flavoring substances. The present publication is the first of several papers reviewing and analyzing the results of this work. This paper describes the content and organization of the scientific data base that the Bureau has compiled, and presents some preliminary general conclusions regarding the processing of these data according to Redbook principles.